Do I need Sagas in my Microservices?

One of the challenges in microservices is managing the consistency and coordination of distributed transactions that involve multiple services. This is where the concept of sagas comes into play.

Sagas

In the context of microservices, a saga is a design pattern that orchestrates a sequence of local transactions across multiple services to ensure data consistency. It represents a higher-level transaction that is composed of smaller, localized transactions within each service involved.

Unlike traditional distributed transactions, which use two-phase commit protocols, sagas provide an alternative approach that embraces the eventual consistency model. Each local transaction within a saga is executed independently and can be compensated if a subsequent transaction fails. This compensation mechanism allows the system to roll back and maintain consistency, even in the presence of failures.

Implementing Sagas in Microservices

To implement sagas in microservices, a coordination mechanism is required. There are two commonly used approaches:

• Choreography-based Saga: In this approach, each service involved in the saga is responsible for handling its own local transaction and communicating with other services using asynchronous events. The sequence of events and their corresponding handlers are defined by the saga coordinator, but the services themselves determine how to react to these events. This…